Retro Review - The Dig

Graphic adventures is one of my favorite genres of video games, as it not only has the ability to present us, in most cases, an excellent game experience through its plot and character development, also thanks to its gameplay and the player having the greatest ability to control the events of the game, creates a perfect harmony between the gameplay and what the game presents us. I've played several graphic adventures in my life and without a doubt this one I'm going to tell you about is one of my favorites.

Today's Retro Review is about the classic: The Dig.

The first time I played this great game I was quite young and for those years I didn't have any knowledge about Geek culture in general, so several years after playing The Dig again, it was a pleasant surprise for me to learn that the plot of this game was created by Steven Spielberg himself, a well known filmmaker and that in his good years he was in charge of creating movies that today are representative of a generation.

The planet earth is in great danger after an observatory observed that very soon on earth will fall a meteorite of great magnitude and only in a matter of a few hours. Therefore, governments from different parts of the world, together with NASA decide to send different professional people various fields of work to travel in a spaceship, place explosive charges in the meteorite and make it explode in order to save the planet earth from its imminent end, for this we will have several characters, which like any graphic adventure, has different personalities, very well developed during all the duration of our adventure.

But the situation will not only be that, since our protagonists "mysteriously" are sent to a planet where they will have to discover the secrets that this planet keeps to help them to return to their homes. As any graphic adventure of those times, all its plot will be very well developed together with its characters, where each one of them will have interactions with their other companions in a way that makes them feel a more realistic game experience and in addition to having our main character, which of all is the best developed plot level.

The Dig maintains a visual style just like a cartoon or animated film, but maintains a high level of realism with respect to other graphic adventures, which opt for a character design and scenes a little more cartoon. Unlike other graphic adventures like the famous Monkey Island, which has a much more vivid and eye-catching color palette, The Dig opted to use a slightly more opaque color palette in such a way, along with designing characters that are a little more realistic than other games and colors, makes this game, as I said before, look much more realistic than others, and equally gives a certain level of seriousness to the story that we want to present and gives us to understand that this game is much more focused on an adult audience as opposed to other games of the same genre.

As well as The Dig's excellent cinematics, where each of them was made to an excellent standard of quality, it shows The Dig as a game that could clearly be a movie. Not for nothing movies like "Armageddon" keep great inspirations in this game.

At this point of the review I think what I'm going to mention about the sound aspect of this game is not of surprise, because as you might suppose, the sound section of The Dig is very good, where it stands out for much his soundtrack, where we can find orchestral compositions where each of them are worthy of hearing due to its great musical level and its great quality, this soundtrack has a characteristic that differentiates it from other graphic adventures, since it has a very "spatial" or "intergalactic" touch, so to speak, these melodies create a captivating atmosphere that together with the plot of the game, makes The Dig an experience that everyone should know about.

In the same way the voices of the characters are perfectly interpreted, each character maintains a characteristic tonality according to his personality, as far as the voices of all the characters have a very professional interpretative level.

Well, in this section I'm not going to go into too much detail, since The Dig maintains a fairly simple gameplay, even compared to other graphic adventures. And as usual, we will control our character by using click on the screen, that is, The Dig maintains the classic "click and point" mode that characterizes games that belong to this genre. We will control our character through different scenarios, always looking for that solution to the problem we have, looking for some information through some character, find certain objects that by combining them give us the right solution to our situation or solve a certain riddle from a list of other riddles that allow us to solve a bigger problem.

The Dig, like other games of the same genre uses the classic SCUMM system, a system that represents the graphic adventures of the old generation, however, in this particular game unlike other games like for example: Monkey Island, which has a list of actions that our character will be able to perform on objects or characters, as for example: "Grab" "Look" or "Pull", in The Dig they chose to simplify this system and with only selecting an object or a character in question in which we want to perform an action, will display a list with two options "Watch" and "Interact", thus giving a gameplay a a little simpler and that helps us (the player) to focus more on the history of the game.

You could say that The Dig is a game a little forgotten unlike its "brothers" like Monkey Island or Indiana Jones, since these games belong to the same company, LucasArts, a company that in its good times, was representative of high quality games, a quality that was later lost over the years, however, although The Dig is an excellent game, it doesn't have the same popularity as the other titles I mention, however, this is a game that should be played by all those who like adventure games and those who want to live a game experience very representative of a generation.